One wall of Graffiti 43648, a graffiti art village, in Hsiushui Borough in Greater Taichung’s Chingshui District on April 25.這張四月二十五日攝於台中清水區秀水里的照片，是Graffiti 43648藝術村的一面牆。

Photo: Ou Su-mei, Liberty Times照片：自由時報記者歐素美

Aside from the current designated graffiti areas located near Taichung Station, the Taichung City Government’s Cultural Affairs Bureau has added two more graffiti areas so that graffiti enthusiasts have more space to spray to their heart’s content. The newly added areas will be available until June of next year. The bureau urges people to make good use of the legal graffiti areas to make the city more attractive.

The graffiti areas currently available to the public are concentrated around the train station in the southern part of the city, including the wall on the east side along section four of Fuhsing Road, the southern and northern walls along Le Yeh Road, as well as the cement wall along Chunglun Street at section one of Jianguo Road. The four legal graffiti zones will remain available to the public until the end of the year.

The bureau says that in order to provide people who enjoy spraying graffiti with more space, they decided to increase the number of graffiti areas to include the cement walls along Chiti Road in Dali District (across from Li Shin Junior High School) and Hanhsi East Road in Taiping District, as well as the flood wall along Chingwu Road.

Bureau director Susan Yeh says that the city government first designed legal zones for graffiti in 2009 as an outlet for graffiti enthusiasts to express themselves freely. She says that the bureau hopes graffiti as an art form can become part of the city’s public art.

The bureau says that since the designated graffiti areas opened, they have attracted many graffiti artists and the overall reaction has been quite good. The bureau says it will make unscheduled inspections of the areas, and if they find any inappropriate drawings they will paint over them to avoid people getting the wrong impression about the graffiti areas or allowing the areas to lose their original positive significance.

TODAY’S WORDS今日單字

1. concentrate v.

集中 (ji2 zhong1)

例: Most of the city’s minorities are concentrated in one small part of the city.